Exterro FTK Imager Pro vs xmlstarlet: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Exterro FTK Imager Pro is a commercial digital forensics and incident response tool by Exterro. xmlstarlet is a free digital forensics and incident response tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best digital forensics and incident response fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Incident response teams and forensic investigators handling iOS devices or encrypted endpoints need FTK Imager Pro for its logical collection capability, which pulls messages, photos, and app data without full disk imaging, cutting acquisition time significantly. The tool's BitLocker detection and decryption paired with write-blocking covers NIST RS.AN and ID.RA requirements for evidence integrity and faster analysis cycles. Skip this if your primary need is network-layer incident detection or you lack dedicated forensics staff; FTK Imager Pro demands hands-on operator expertise and fits workflows where disk acquisition and mobile extraction are blocking your investigation timeline.
Incident responders and forensics teams parsing XML logs at scale should reach for XMLStarlet when grep and awk hit their limits; its XPath query engine extracts nested data from malformed or deeply structured XML faster than writing custom parsers. The tool is free and ships as a single binary that runs anywhere, eliminating dependency hell in evidence collection workflows. Skip this if your team needs GUI interaction or expects built-in visualization of results; XMLStarlet is unambiguously a command-line instrument for practitioners comfortable with piping and scripting.
